Rising popularity of momentum curves?

By Chris on April 30, 2010

At Recorded Future, we compute a momentum value for each entity and event in our database. The momentum value indicates how interesting a certain event or entity is at a particular time, and is continously updated. In computing the momentum value, we take into account the volume of news around an entity or event, as well as what sources it is mentioned in, what other events and entities it is mentioned together with, and several other factors.

Every time you type an entity name in the What field of our web user interface, you get a sparkline indicating the last 30 day’s momentum of that entity,
e.g. the following for Thailand as of April 28 2010:

The momentum measure is used to present the most relevant query results in our web user interface, but it can also be analyzed using statistical methods to predict possible future changes in momentum, which in turn can be valuable e.g. for trading decisions. Correlation between the momentum curves of different entities can also be an indication of interesting relationships between those entities. Here is an example of a a timeline view of news about man-made disasters in Thailand, with a momentum curve included:

We think the momentum measure is a key indicator, useful in many analysis tasks, and therefore it is encouraging to see that similar ideas and visualizations are popping up in other places. Here’s a good one, from the very nice website HistoryShots, showing the births, deaths and power positions of political parties in the US:

The big difference between an artistically rendered momentum curve like this and ours is of course that ours are updated continuously as the world evolves.

Do you have other good examples of momentum-like measures and visualizations? Let us know!